1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to managing printout of electronic documents.
2. Related Art
In environments where electronic documents are distributed to or shared among various users, it is becoming common to store the electronic documents in a uniform format viewable on screens, such as PDF (Portable Document Format), in order to reduce storage cost. PDF is an electronic document format developed by Adobe Systems Incorporated in the U.S. and has been recently standardized by ISO (International Organization for Standardization).
In recent years, with enactment of the Electronic Documents Law, more and more business documents such as form documents are being stored as electronic documents.
Meanwhile, with respect to business use, form documents are still typically printed on paper. For example, as an operational method to manage orders for goods, order reception is centrally managed at a center while form documents for submitting orders needed in each region are transferred to a printing apparatus within the region, so that the form documents are printed and used there. For such uses, the data format for printing is desirably standardized, and for convenience of computerized storage and viewing, PDF can be used as the data format for printing and storage. In particular, such an operation is enabled by providing a printing apparatus capable of directly printing PDF.
Generally, form document data transferred from the center to all regions in the country have their system settings fixed by the system so that each form document is transferred to an appropriate specific output destination. Thus, measures are taken to avoid erroneous transfers. However, in cases such as where a system trouble occurs and the operation is switched to a backup system, a form document may be transmitted to an unintended output destination due to a failure caused by the switching or other causes. In consideration of such cases, it has been necessary to visually check each printed form document at each regional site where the form document is output.